Defector: Cuba Targets Homestead Base

WASHINGTON -- A Cuban air force general who defected to the United States five months ago says Cuban combat pilots regularly practice for retaliatory strikes against Homestead Air Force base.

The defector, Brig. Gen. Rafael del Pino Diaz, a former deputy commander of the air force, said in an interview that the training was strictly defensive and that Cuba had no intention of starting a fight with the United States.

There is nothing to indicate that a U.S. military confrontation with Cuba is in the offing, but foreign affairs and military experts say they cannot rule out the possibility of a limited clash.

U.S. strategists had recognized that Cuba, with the largest air force in Latin America, had the ability to strike targets in Florida. But a spokesman for the Defense Department and a senior State Department official said the United States had not previously been aware of such a specific plan.

``This is interesting information,`` the State Department official said. He added: ``I think it falls short of saying how Cuba would actually respond. They could do all sorts of things.``

Ramon Sanchez-Parodi, the chief of Cuba`s diplomatic mission in Washington, said he could not comment on Cuban military training or how Cuba might react to an attack.

It was not possible to verify del Pino`s statements independently.

In the interview, del Pino, the highest-ranking Cuban official to abandon his country for the United States, talked for nearly four hours about Cuba`s expeditionary force in Angola, about growing discontent in Cuba as the economy worsens, about the nearly 10,000 Soviet civilian and military advisers in Cuba, and about his life in the United States and his hopes for the future. He also touched briefly on Nicaragua.

The general, who said he had been one of seven deputies in the high command of the Cuban air force, has been under federal protection since May 28, when he flew a light plane to Florida with his wife and three children. He said he was questioned by American intelligence officers for two or three weeks.

Security officials, concerned about the general`s safety, asked that the time and place of the newspaper interview, the first with an independent American news organization, not be disclosed. During the interview an armed guard in civilian clothes stood by.

The short, stocky 49-year-old general said he had flown a MiG-23 bomber in drills that simulated raids on the base south of Miami ``two or three times,`` as recently as a year ago. He said Cuban pilots practiced in a similar way for retaliatory strikes against the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, on leased land on the eastern tip of Cuba.

As del Pino spoke, he sketched a diagram of Homestead Air Force Base, indicating the control tower, runways and parking places for American combat planes. He said Cuba had photographed the base extensively in 1968 when a group of Cubans had been authorized by the United States to go to Homestead to recover a MiG-17 in which a Cuban lieutenant had defected.

He said Cuba recognized that it was no match for its big neighbor, and that its intention in counterattacking would be to provoke the United States into an even stronger action ``so the Soviet Union would become involved.``

``Then,`` he said, reciting what he said was the Cuban plan, ``the United States would try to avoid this type of confrontation and end its aggression against Cuba.``

The general said he commanded the first Cuban air units in Angola in late 1975 and had returned there three or four times a year. Cuba has more than 30,000 troops and advisers in Angola.

He said Cuban soldiers and airmen were often sent on missions for which they were untrained, that morale was low and that Angola was being used as a punishment post. As an example, he said all of the 40 or so Cuban officers who he said suffered the humiliation of capture by U.S. troops in Grenada in 1983, along with several hundred Cuban enlisted men, had been demoted and sent to Angola.

Del Pino said that earlier this year, for the first time, the Cuban police began receiving riot control training because Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, feared ``a social explosion.`` The country is in a severe economic crisis.

The general, who studied at a Baptist high school in Knoxville, Tenn., as a teen-ager and speaks both Spanish and English, said reports that Nicaraguan fighter pilots were based in Cuba were incorrect. As to how Cuba might react should the United States invade Nicaragua -- a subject of frequent speculation in Latin America -- he said he had no information.

He said that a Soviet general had been assigned as his adviser but that he seldom saw the man. He said the Soviet advisers generally behaved as though they were ``on a long vacation in a tropical country.``

He said 2,500 Soviet technicians worked at a big electronic intelligence center near Havana that is able to monitor telephone conversations along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. But he said Cubans were denied access to this installation.

The general said that he was working on a book and that U.S. officials had provided him and his family with a house and living expenses. He said that he had no intention of taking a new identity or of living secretly for the rest of his life, and that he hoped to take up residence in the Miami area and perhaps go on a lecture tour.

In a related development, Miami Spanish-language radio station WAQI openly defied a government ban on rebroadcast of material intended for foreign audiences and retransmitted Friday a second Radio Marti interview with another Cuban defector. The station defended its action by saying First Amendment rights were at stake.